19 February 2011

My Viking buddy Reidar alerted me to this tweet here: “I’m gonna get a tattoo that says ‘Helvetica’, written in Arial. When a woman corrects me on it, I will marry her.”

My wife’s response to this is that if such a woman were enough of a font wonk to spot the difference (I’m paraphrasing here, obviously) she wouldn’t be able to stand marrying someone who has a dirty great tattoo in Arial. (Me, I hate the capital R. So ugly.) She may be right. Prospective font-paradox tattooees, you have been warned.

One final thing I have to report about our trip to Udine: there is a local cake called gubana, which is kind of like a combination of brioche, lardy cake, mince pies and an off-licence. Ingredients of the filling include hazelnuts, sultanas, almonds, lemon peel, pine nuts, grappa, brandy, rum and marsala.

Walking through Shaftesbury this afternoon with my friend Matt, while discussing the joys of KFC we found ourselves outside a rather smart Indian restaurant that neither of us has yet visited.

Perusing the very smartly typeset menu in the window, I heard Matt say, “Look, they do Tandoori McSquirrel.” Somewhat surprised, I followed his pointed finger to the legend “Tandoori Mixed Grill”, which is of course exactly what he’d said. In rapid speech, the one could be misinterpreted as the other, but it says something for my fevered imagination that I could mishear something so normal as something so hysterically improbable.

I giggled like a schoolgirl for a good 5 minutes. Matt says he’s going to order Tandoori McSquirrel at the first opportunity.

Saw these signs in Udine, north-east Italy. Utterly cool, great “sense of place”... where else would you see a street sign using a font like this? And then I realised I was also photographing a military surveillance sign. Fortunately the guards didn't see me...